Our Founder and Editor

Matthew O’Brien is a writer, teacher, and editor with more than twenty years of experience. Matt was managing editor of the alt-weekly paper Las Vegas CityLife and senior managing editor of the city magazine Downtown ZEN. He has taught composition, business writing, and in the honor’s college at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and American lit, world lit, and AP lit at Escuela Americana, a prep school in San Salvador. He also worked in the writing lab at the two schools.

Matt has authored three books—Beneath the Neon, My Week at the Blue Angel, and Dark Days, Bright Nights—and his nonfiction has been published in several magazines and newspapers, including the Las Vegas Review-Journal, High Country News, AARP the Magazine, and the Denver Post. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Sandstone & Silver (Zeitgeist Press 2019), In the Shadow of the Strip (University of Nevada Press 2003), Interim, Red Rock Review, and other books and journals.

Matt, who has a bachelor’s in history from the University of West Georgia and an MFA in creative writing from UNLV, is the founder of Shine a Light, a program that provides housing, drug counseling, and other services to the people who live in the underground flood channels of Las Vegas (which he has written about extensively). OES provides pro bono résumé and cover-letter editing for clients of Shine a Light.

Matt's Personal Website

Matt's Wikipedia Page